Three young urban professionals have teamed up to ignite the business passion of Filipino millennials by creating online courses designed to train at least 10,000 entrepreneurs.
“We want to be the Alibaba or Uber of entrepreneurship education,” says Marvin Perol, the 26-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Blue Pen Inc., the company behind Bizcool, a modern term for ‘business school’.
Perol, who owns a video production studio, established Bizcool together with Vincent Velasquez, a professor at the University of Santo Tomas and Julio Ingco III, who now manages a family business that provides water pump solutions to condominium buildings and commercial establishments.
Perol and Ingco graduated with a Master’s degree in Entrepreneurship at Ateneo Graduate School in 2016, while Velasquez, who obtained an M.A. in Psychology from UST, is a friend of Perol. Together, they want to teach millennials, or those in the age group 25 to 35 years, to become entrepreneurs through Bizcool.ph.
“The more businesses that we create, the more the economy grows. The more entrepreneurs we train, the more we are able to create jobs,” Perol says in an interview in Makati City.
Perol, who previously worked in a broadcast network, now owns Open Reel Film Gears, a video solutions company that started at his garage and is now worth P40 million with more than 50 employees. Perol says he wants to share his entrepreneurial experience to the millennial generation, which he considers the most entrepreneurial generation. Bizcool, he says, aims to unleash their potential to influence other people’s lives and leave a strong social impact through entrepreneurship.
Perol says the vision for Bizcool is “to be the ecosystem builder for aspiring entrepreneurs and educators.” He describes Bizcool as something like an online manual to entrepreneurship. Simply put, Bizcool is a learning community on entrepreneurship that adopts a blended learning approach, combining digital courses and face to face workshops. It derives its revenues from user fees, amounting to P1,100 per online course.
The three most popular online courses on the platform are about coffee shop, eatery and internet shop. Bizcool will soon expand the list to include bakeshop, sari sari store, party or events business, online store, sizzling house, make up studio, water refilling station, ‘tapsilogan’ and food cart.
Each online course contains dozens of articles and video tutorials, with each tutorial about 5 to 10 minutes long. Tutorials start with basics such as business registration and bookkeeping and tackle lessons such as location, market, capital raising, cash flow, financial statement and income targeting. Advanced lessons are also available.
The three co-founders spent almost a year to conduct research, build the online platform and prepare the online courses. After formally launching Bizcool in November this year, the site has already attracted 500 users, with about 8 percent already availing of the premium or paid subscription.
Bizcool initially offers free trial to entice users. About 8 percent of them end up paying P1,100 for the premium service.
Bizcool has initially raised P2 million in seed capital, enough to reach the stage with 11 products. Perol estimates that the target of having 10,000 paying users within 12 months would generate P12 million in revenues. Once the target is achieved, Bizcool hopes to go to the next investment round to raise more capital.
At present, Bizcool.ph has yet to bring its marketing campaign at full blast, as it still studies the best conversion rate for Google Adwords or Facebook.
“What we are trying to do is reach the product market here in the Philippines, get 10,000 to 50,000 users, which would be more than enough for venture capitalist. Then we want to bring it to other countries,” says Perol.
Aside from the online courses, Bizcool also holds workshops to bring the aspiring entrepreneurs and resource speakers under one roof.
“The vision of our company is we want to help people to get into entrepreneurship, especially among millennials. When we did our research before we started the product development, we found that about 58 percent of millennials extremely value entrepreneurship, but they don’t have access to education,” says Velasquez.
“We want to help the millennials to take that leap of faith into entrepreneurship. Just like the three of us, we saw that education is the way. On how we go about it is by boosting e-learning,” says Ingco.
Ingco says Bizcool takes inspiration from the video tutorials on Youtube, except that none of those tutorials devote the same focus and content on entrepreneurship as Bizcool.
“We are trying to differentiate ourselves. We are trying to become a specialist in entrepreneurship education, not only in general sense, but also on micro level sense. The three of us, we want to be a driving force for our country as well,” says Ingco.